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Normally, reading Labourlist makes me want to go outside, find anyone who professes to be a socialist and beat them to within an inch of their life.

Currently, however, there is an excellent post by Labour PPC Andrew Lomas decrying the “denigration of science for political expediency”.

Well worth a read.

Of course, in order to restore the clever/stupid balance to the universe, the comments section has been colonised by a complete mong who thinks that David Nutt kills children. And is a Tory. Or something.

Like this:

Let’s be clear, as Iain is wont to say, Iain Dale is far and away my favourite media whore. He’s a tireless self promoter and you have to admire someone who has actually achieved a mild degree of celebrity for, well, saying stuff.

He is also my second favourite Tory, after Michael Portillo. Both of them share my favourite attribute of a Tory in that neither of them are currently in power (Hague is disqualified from participating because of this rule, although Boris might sneak in on an exception, who knows.)

Sometimes, I wonder how he manages to keep missing out on being selected, then other times, you get such gems as this tweet from the Dublin Web Summit, tweeted by @tweetminster

Like this:

Scandal in the internets! Oh noes!
An interesting blog post from Mark Reckons today suggests that some MPs have been blocking people from following them on twitter.

Apprantly, this has happened to a few people as evidenced by further blog posts from Sarah Bedford – who seems to have been blocked by Nadine Dorries MP for some perceived slight – and Parlez~me~’n~Tory who details the rather more serious case of Parmjit Dhanda MP apparently blocking one of his constituents and subsequently writing her an abusive letter after a tweet that even a fully paid up member of the Permanently Outraged would be hard pressed to take offence at.

Mark asked if any others had been blocked by MPs. And it was in fact only then that I realised that my twitterverse had been blissfully empty of empty headed rhetoric from “Twitter Tsar” Kerry McCarthy MP and egregious bullshit from perennial blowhard Tom Harris MP, both of whom I had been following at some point.

So I popped over to their twitter profiles to click the follow button and lo! Both of them had blocked me. Sweet! Now in fairness to them, and in the spirit of openness and transparency, I will publish the last tweets that I directed at them here. If you’ve never read this blog before, I should tell you up front that I am not very nice.

Swearing, it is big, and it is clever
KerryMP had just made some extraordinarily bitchy remark about Nadine Dorries, I don’t much give a toss about Nadine Dorries, but KerryMP had been in full flow about her for some time, so what the hell.

@kerrymp OMFG you’re so FUCKING FUNNY

Tom Harris had just written some arse clenchingly gushing blog post about how wonderful Tony Blair is, ending with this gem.

So I’m looking forward to what I guess can be called the third part of “The Blair Trilogy”. But not half as much as I’m looking forward, on this one occasion, to deleting any comment that describes Tony as either a liar or a war criminal.

Because he is neither.

And he posted a link to it in twitter, as you do. To which I rather thoughtfully replied

RT @TomHarrisMP: The return of Tony Blair! http://tr.im/ophy Blair is both a liar and a war criminal. Delete that, fucktard.

I did say I wasn’t very nice, but jeez, Louise, talk about thin skinned. I mean I don’t know if Tom just hates me because I think Blair is a liar and a war criminal or because made a sweary at him.

Gotta collect ’em all!
This got me to thinking, if such it can be called, that it might be fun to have @ various tweeting MPs to see how many I can get to block to me. The only thing that’s stopping me is the high probability that I would quickly end up on the radar of the The Fixated Threat Assessment Centre.

But still, the urge is perversely strong. Perhaps if I do it slowly, subtly …

@DavidLammyMP Doesn’t love the NHS! You can tell from his twitter pic, which lacks the current standard logo. Pah.

Captains Log, Supplemental
If you do find yourself blocked from some MP’s tweet feed, for making swearies at them or for some other reason, despair not, you can still read their tweets via their twitter pages, and you can, in fact, still send them messages.

You can also try the rather fun apps from tweetminster, with whom I am in no way affiliated (just a fan). Their web app LiveWire and their Adobe Air twetdeck-a-like desktop app ‘The Tweetminster Wire Lite‘, which I’ve been playing with today.

These should slake your MP stalking thirst as they list tweets from all MPs, PPCs and various other political bods.